I’ve had a similar problem with nannies. I hired them, and they just hang around drinking and watching tv. I’ve also got problems with visitors stealing from my money tree.
Anybody else finds the idea of aspiring for a bowl of cereal underwhelming?
I have two sims who have recently been getting repeated wants to eat toaster pastries. Why do my sims crave Pop-Tarts? And the last time one of them tried to satisfy that craving instead of waiting for Dave (who looks remarkably like Lister from Red Dwarf) to make them, he burned them. Nothing like burnt Pop-Tarts to make your day. At least they didn’t catch on fire.
One of my older sims has a flatulence problem. Every so often he’ll stop and let loose a cloud of green gas. His wife gets gas too; hers isn’t green, but when she lets one go, she giggles a little bit afterwards. I need to get both of their aspirations back into platinum in the next few days so when they die their daughter will get a good death benefit (which, since she’s a Fortune sim, will really enjoy spending).
No, but then since I started playing I have had lunchmeat sandwiches, grilled cheese, and mac and cheese to fulfill my own aspirations.
Does anyone else here hate Angela Pleasant?
As I last mentioned Runcible Quince proposed to have his best friend, Darren Dreamer move in. Darren brought his teen son, Dirk who is Lilith Pleasant’s boyfriend. She was a delight to interact with. I satated playing Brandi Broke. I made single business sim, Gnose Snifter for her to marry. When I started playing Brandi, she is sick, pregnant, has a toddler and a teen. No job, not that much money left. Angela comes home with Dustin, the teen, and eats Brandi’s dinner when she goes to attend to the toddler. That family was hard to turn around. There are two key things, do not sell the pinball machine until the family is doing well, and wall off the hall to make a bedroom for the toddler. That way he can get some sleep. Otherwise the tv and the stereo will wake him. The pinball machine is important in getting Justin to do hi homework. He needs fun and it is fun 10. Also, use smart milk to teach the toddler to walk, etc. One day, while little Cognac was a baby, Dustin brought Alvin home. Alvin was a life saver. He helped with the baby and Brandi got some sleep and was able to bathe. The toilet I added in Brandi’s bedroom was also a big help. Now, the whole famly is often in platinum, Cognac and Beau grew up well, and Justin is happy and has a B+. Angela nearly sabotaged the whole thing several times.
Back to the Pleasants. Realize that Lilith is on her own. No one will help her with homework, the parents are just going to lecture her. Angela is a bitch who will do whatever it takes to harm Lilith. She is supposed to be nice, but initiates all kind of nastiness. She will die a horrible death.
Brandi Broke will soon be Brandi Snifter, or I could have Gnose become Broke. They are in love and engaged.
Carmen Wyatt is moving up in her life of crime. She has become a bookie. She changed her hairstyle to reflect her more mature outlook on life. Her oldest son, Ben, managed to pull his grades up to passing and kiss his girlfriend before he became an adult. Sadly, the love of his life is now only a friend since she’s still a teenager. The youngest child, Maria, became a teenager and took on a part time job as a water girl and got herself a boyfriend. Her grades have started slipping, though, so she may have to quit work and concentrate on school. Single mom Carmen managed to find some time to do a little WooHoo with her new friend, whose name escapes me at the moment. That pissed off her other friend, Loki, who didn’t like that they were doing their WooHoo in the same hot tub as him.
Regarding the game: Has anyone else noticed that some of the aspiration items make things just too easy? The one that elevates your moods makes it possible to get anything you might want done. I found it very easy to reach enough points to buy almost anything in the list.
Another thing, some of the items seemed to have disappeared. The thinking cap was just gone. I had left my machine alone for a while and when I came back, it wasn’t anywhere around. The same happened to the non-aspiration object, the teddy bear, but I think the kid just destroyed that one.
I played the Brokes all weekend! 
Granted, I thought she was getting fat when she started showing her pregnancy…so I made her work out and that didn’t help the house situation…she just got more and more tired and yet oddly bigger and bigger. 
I was quite confused.
Having just seen Slice Quince go through pregnancy, I realized that she was in that condition immediately. Being sick as well made it so much worse.
Now I want to reward Dustin somehow. Maybe by making him a nice girlfriend rather than Angela.
I made a new family, Eldon and Miana Zax and their roomie Krina, and installed them in one of the less expensive Pleasantville houses… and then discovered that I had to furnish it and add another bedroom. Cheap-and-cheerful furniture it was.
I discovered that Krina was hitting on Eldon even though Eldon was married to Miana. I had trouble getting them to do things like have dinner; Eldon and Krina got into an argument loop while Miana stomped off upstairs and went to sleep. I decided to let the game just run, and came back 15 minutes later to find Miana passed out on the floor of the bedroom with two vital stats in the red zone (no food, no hygeine). That was so disturbing that I shud down and didn’t save.
Later, I went downtown and was looking around at the people on the subway and thinking how much they all looked like sims. :eek: I sometimes have a hard time connecting to people anyway, and I wonder whether this game may not have the best effect on me… Sunday my friends and I went to an exhibit of Shona sculpture near Peterborough, outside in the beautiful weather, and that was a welcome antidote.
I think I need to learn more about managing my sims. Do they need to be told to take care of themselves? At one point, I tried to tell Miana and Eldon to go and look for a job, but they said, “I really don’t feel like doing that.” And went back to arguing. :eek: And Miana wouldn’t get food for herself. I couldn’t get Eldon to serve dinner, and…
I’m getting all worked up.
I’m starting slowly. I designed one sim, installed her in her own place and ran it (I picked a female because I figure I could have more fun as a women :D).
I had to turn off aging because I’m busy working on getting her job stats up (she’s a OR doctor now). The game is crack on a PC.
I also have the nude patch (yeah yeah). Nothing special, the sim women doesn’t have much to show. The characters look better in pajamas
Anyone found bed bugs? Not the ones with many legs, the computer kind.
I started out by creating Vince and Connie Calcaterra and moved them into Strangeville. Vince is in the Athletic career is worked his way up to Minor Leaguer while Connie is currently the breadwinner in Special Forces. Everything was fine except for their four-poster bed; for some reason only one could use it at a time and I couldn’t understand why. Not until I tried to sell it and get a better bed. Somehow that four-poster was stuck in Use mode! They didn’t really have enough Simoleans to have their house redesigned but I found something better. I had bought the strategy guide and while looking for the money cheat I happened upon Moveobjects. Problem solved!
Sometimes your Sims mood levels have to be pretty good (i.e., green) to get them to do challenging things like look for a job, or play chess. If they’re depressed or underentertained, they won’t do it. Do they ever face you, wave their arms and scream at you? That’s a subtle way of letting you know something’s amiss. Look at the thought bubble above their heads and it will have symbols of the need (t.v.'s for more fun, couches if they’re uncomfortable, etc.)
Deadly Accurate, I think some of those items have a limited number of uses & then disappear (thinking cap). Kids’ toys usually have a “Smash” option as well as “Play” when you click on them.
Yeah, yeah, I bought it. I was up 'til 3:30 playing with Winona Cookie, her girlfriend Sugar Cookie and their daughter Girlscout. As opposed to being up til 3:30 lurking here 
. Anybody else’s Sims spit Jell-O all over the place when they eat it? Hilarious. Winona has a knowledge aspiration and she pointedly reminds me about it by thinking of her little scroll whenever I have her clean something up - “What do I look like, some kind of maid?” They didn’t used to leave their espresso cups lying around everywhere!
I must say I’m a tad disappointed by the number of Buy options. The original Sims had many many more in different styles (although I love the Art Nouveau!). I’m a decorating freak - I love to build themed houses and furnish them, so I can tell that eventually I’m going to be wanting to download many a user-created item. I have thousands in my Sims 1 games. Maxis-created “art” is so ugly!
God, I’m tired…
I expect there will be fan-made nude skins by the end of the year.
The “Chance Cards” as they’re called make things fairly interesting. They’re th choices that come up while your sim is at work. Man, I sucked at 'em at first, picking the wrong choice for the first five or six in a row. :mad:
But I got better. Yesterday one came up, and while I don’t even remember what it said, I must have picked the right one…
[spoiler]I pleased someone who was about to die and he left me $75,000 in his will! :eek:
The sim I was playing with at the time was a single woman. I quickly made her adopt a kid so I could pass on that wealth! :D[/spoiler]
This game is addictive as hell. Sadly, by the time I’ll probably be able to finally pry myself away from it for two seconds, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 will be coming out. :eek:
Sounds like you have a sloppy Sim. When Darren Dreamer eats, about half the time he’ll hold the dish up to his chin and spray food all over the place as he’s shovleing it into his mouth.
Did you notice that if you have a painter in the family you can hang his or her creations on the wall after they’re done? I have a whole wall lined with art painted by the mother in my main house I’m working on, including several portraits of her kids.
I suspected that would be the case but haven’t gotten around to having anyone paint anything. I imagine the Sim’s creativity has to be pretty high before the pictures improve the environment score. Wouldn’t it be funny if you could only hang the pictures on the fridge until the Sim had at least 3 creativity points?
Creativity will increase once for about every two completed paintings. I had Darren Dreamer paint so much that he’s maxxed out. His paintings now sell for upwards of 400 Simoleans and there’s a portrait of Lilith Pleasant hanging by the front door. I’ll see about having Darren move in with someone once Dirk and Lilith get married.
I’ve been playing a family for a while now.
Started off as a single female Sim aspiring to be rich.
I then got her knocked up by the mailman.
She raised her daughter single-handedly all the way up to adulthood and then married the father.
She’s now an elder and he’s a few (12?) days behind her.
I had her paint pictures of her daughter at each phase in her life and then made the mistake of moving the family to a bigger house and lost them all. 
I see in the photo album that the screen shots they were done from are still there, so I guess if they put out another Art Maker type program I can reproduce them.
I’m on the third generation now!
Betty and Pao (mailman) begot Elizabeth.
Elizabeth grew up and moved out and married Mitch, a fireman that put out a fire that Elizabeth started when she was a teen.
Elizabeth and Mitch have a son, Luke, and now a baby girl, Liza.
See a theme with the females? 
I also have the females of this family wear the decorative curlicue eye makeup.
So far none of Betty’s descendants have shown to have her pointy ears.
I was up until 3:00am last night bringing up babies!
Vacation Days/Sick Days:
These took me a minute to figure out how to use vacation days and I had a bunch saved up that Betty really needed to use while bringing up Elizabeth.
Vacation Days - how many you have accumulated are shown in the job menu. To use one, just don’t go to work. Don’t call, don’t go.
Work will call you in an hour or so and tell you that you have used a vacation day and you get paid immediately.
Sick Days - One hour before your Sim is to go to work, pick up the phone and call in. If you’re doing good at your job, they’ll believe you and tell you to stay home and get well. You keep your vacation days and don’t get paid.
I’m having odd things happen with my guests. Calista Despret, the NPC nanny, came over and decided to take a bath and sleep in my kid’s bed. Then one of the gardeners that I mentioned earlier came over the next and annnounced that he was miffed because apparently I had “asked him to spend the night” but hadn’t let him get any sleep.
Go figure.
Jeff Olsen, I encountered a similar “bed bug.” Well, it was a sofa, not a bed. But my poor character, after the visit from the Welcome Wagon, found that she could not sit down on her sofa. Tried selling the sofa, but it was, as you note, marked “in use.” Then I noticed a couple of ghostly indentations - there were still invisible asses in the seat. So I had two sofas until I married her off and got her out of the house. She was telling all her visitors, “You can’t sit there, it’s haunted.”
The people in the welcome wagon were all Maxis-made families that I had evicted (I prefer to use entirely people I’d made myself) - even though they didn’t live in the 'hood, they still came with the Welcome Wagon. I kicked them out of the Sim Bin, and the problem hasn’t recurred… wonder if using sims from the bin but out of the neighborhood might have caused the problem.
jellyblue, I gotta say I’m with you - one of the very few disappointments I have is that so far there aren’t a whole lot of objects for sims to use. Wish there were other fitness tools available aside from the bench press machine, other musical instruments aside from the piano. I think it’s a little more than the original Sims had, but we’re all used to the massive accretion of objects over four years with Sims 1, aren’t we?
Love how expressive the faces and inflections are. The inflections are so dead-on that I could tell when the sims were watching a news broadcast (sounds like somebody was saying, “Okay, Bob. Stay warm out there.”)
The aspirations system really is a great improvement - now it forces me to play different sims in different ways, which will I think really give the game a more story-like feel down the road. And what’s going on in their passing years really seems to have an impact on their passing moments. I also like how interactions between two guest sims has a stronger impact on later relationships - I never could get two sims to be friends by just inviting them over to my house before. Love how guest sims aspirations change as well.
After a weekend of gameplay, I’m not really seeing the same interactions and the same stuff over and over. Makes a huge difference that guest sims come over, and don’t always fulfil needs in the same order (used to be eat, use bathroom, flush, make toilet overflow, watch TV, then talk; now there isn’t a single most common sequence).
Building is great fun, and because sims can finally run into each other without stalling for up to three minutes (or three hours sim time!), I can build rooms with only a single door each - more lifelike houses in general.
Improvements I hope to see with expansion packs:
More stuff. Talked about that. Especially a greater variety of skill-building things. I want my chemistry set!
Simlish. The expressiveness of speech has gotten much better, but the actual “words” used don’t have the same charm as the original simlish. “Words” are less differentiated and sound a bit more like “Blah blah blah, huduh blopablah.” But then again, maybe that’s more realistic - this new simlish does sound more like listening to a conversation in the next apartment that’s too muffled to understand, but loud enough to keep you awake.
Memory annotations. Would be nice if there were a way to edit memory annotations - would be very helpful in making a story. The existing annotations are (necessarily) vague, and could use some user-guided replacing.
Music - I gotta agree with almost everybody else that the music’s nothing special - good thing I have an enormous library of music of my own I can insert. But there’s no classical option on the stereo?
BTW - harmless - that sounds like a very cool way to play. What do the NPC’s bring with them when you marry them? Any friends? Family tree? Money? What kind of aspirations do they usually have? Did you get the fireman to marry you in a single visit, or did you have to keep lighting fires until lifetime relationship scores were high enough?
I haven’t done it, but I assume marrying a fireman or maid would be like anyone else. Once you “meet” the person, you’ll be able to call/email/invite them out on the town. You can use the social stuff at that point to make friends with the character, eventually leading to whatever else.